Next time I'll wear a ball gown

She didn't want to leave her room today. My usually offensive hair (long, wild, unbrushed) went unnoticed by her today, her focus shifting to my unforgivable choice in pants. Now in retrospective, I should have known better. These were text book 'grandma will hate these' pants: baggy, torn, faded, knees completely blown out, just hanging off me.  She took breaks from asking to brush my two year old son's hair to mention how terrible I looked.  I told her that she could brush my son's hair after she let me brush her hair, which she nodded would be fine.

We decided to go sit outside and she hemmed and hawed a little about leaving her room and my mother and I realized she was worried what the old ladies who lined the hallway would think, the ones who sat chatting quietly in their wheelchairs, waiting for it to be time for the next meal, the main activity at the nursing home. I teased her and promised that the next time I visited I would wear a ball gown. She smiled and laughed at me and my mother watched us, as she often does when my grandmother and I are together, quietly, taking it all in. She has been front and center for the magical relationship my grandmother and I have shared for the past three decades. She understands my pain in losing her to Alzheimers like no other person can. 

I want to turn back time and have it be the summer of '86 or '87, when my grandpa was still well enough to go the beach and my grandmother still smoked menthols and played cards with the neighbors and she fed me and bathed me and brushed my hair.  I want to go back to a time when she held my hand while we played cards, not because she needed to, but because an extra squeeze reminded me how much she loved. I want to sleep on her couch again, on cool sheets, as I hear her quietly snoring in the room next door.  I want to be ten years old again in her kitchen, peeling apple after apple, carefully piling the peels in a neat little mound, preparing pies for Thanksgiving.

When I look at her, I see who she is today, but also who she was, all those years and all of those things we did together.  I am so lucky, to have been taught how to play gin rummy by a champ and make a pie by a fantastic baker. So thankful for all she has taught me.